Monuments Decolonized

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage.

Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments emerge here as objects with a soul, offering visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. Richly illustrated with more than 100 color images, Monuments Decolonized offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.

"The insights Slyomovics illuminates in this book are not only important to understanding Algerian history but are also vital for understanding material culture in Africa and the larger world. Monuments Decolonized is an essential contribution to the fields of heritage studies and North African history, with profound knowledge into the intersections of memory, art, and politics. Monuments Decolonized is therefore essential for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the enduring impacts of colonialism on cultural landscapes."—Bankole Wright, H-Material-Culture

"Monuments Decolonized assembles a magnificent array of ethnographic, visual, and historical materials tracing the deaths and afterlives of France's monuments erected in French-colonized Algeria. By studying these monuments' lives from their origins to the present, Susan Slyomovics has set a new and inspiring benchmark in settler-colonial studies and monument studies." —Mia Fuller, University of California, Berkeley, author of Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism

"Susan Slyomovics not only provides an innovative analysis of French colonialism and its aftermath in Algeria through memorials, but also complicates current debates on the future of colonial statues elsewhere, including the US. Monuments Decolonized is a mosaic of fascinating examples that coalesce into a big narrative, asking heady questions about heritage, patrimony, 'nostalgeria,' re-use, appropriation, and erasure." —Zeynep Çelik, Columbia University, author of Empire, Architecture, and the City

"This invaluable work unpacks the complexities of colonial and war monuments' signifiers, histories, and affects in Algeria and France. Monuments Decolonized is a groundbreaking textual and visual call for a 'transformative action.'" —Samia Henni, McGill University, author of Architecture of Counterrevolution